23 July—As Donald Trump intensifies his vexatious crusade to alienate Americans and America’s allies as he antagonizes the free world while enriching himself and his evil spawn and sycophantic klepto-oligarch cronies, back in Connecticut it’s been revealed that an alleged undocumented immigrant was registered to vote back in 2018 but never voted. Oh the horror!

Of course, that’s nothing compared to the 6,600 noncitizens who were registered to vote in New Jersey between 2023 and 2024, with 400 actually having voted. Through no fault of their own, mind you. But when all is said and done, these anomalous voter registrations are all the product of the asinine, ill-conceived National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known by its initialism NVRA.

The NVRA, which took effect in 1995, having been passed by bipartisan majorities in both congressional houses, is more popularly known as the Motor Voter Law because among other titles it requires states to offer people—not just citizens, it turns out—the opportunity to register as voters at state motor vehicle offices when they’re applying for driver’s licenses, for instance.

The Motor Voter Law also requires states to offer people—not just citizens, it turns out—the opportunity to register to vote by mail. It’s not that the Motor Voter Law invites fraud or is more vulnerable to errors than in-person registration with a registrar of voters or municipal clerk (which it does, to be sure), it’s that it makes registering to vote too damn easy.

And that’s just registering. Voting, which according to Article I of the U.S. Constitution is almost totally controlled by individual states rather than the federal government, has been made far too easy in many states, including Connecticut (of course). Take drop boxes. Please. They’re expressly permitted in 29 states, including Connecticut (of course), and the District of Columbia, and are expressly prohibited in only 11 states.

Along with mail-in ballots (as opposed to absentee ballots), drop boxes encourage voting by people who don’t really give a damn and therefore shouldn’t be voting in the first place. And as we’ve seen in Bridgeport, drop boxes and mail-in ballots make election fraud very easy and thus very tempting.

Voting may be a constitutional right, but it’s also a privilege and a responsibility and therefore should be done responsibly. Yeah, right. And states like Connecticut encourage irresponsibility in voting. We know that.

If you think in-person registration and voting are inconvenient, consider that before so-called Permanent Personal Registration was enabled in New York State in 1954 at the discretion of individual municipalities and mandated statewide in 1967, voters had to register every year and in person. And they did it . . .